Enabling social workers to think clearly under pressure, particularly when they are responsible for child protection investigations and conference chairing, is key to managing the complexity of the LCPP role, argue Amy Eyers and Anna Harvey.
By Amy Eyers and Dr Anna Harvey
In a number of local authorities, lead child protection practitioners (LCPPs) are now undertaking both section 47 enquiries and chairing child protection conferences, as permitted by government policy.
These are responsibilities that have, until recently, been held by different people, for good reason. Bringing them together into one role is a significant ask and the sector is still working out what it means in practice. The child protection task is already complex, so what can support good decision making in the light of these changes?
What we explore here is not whether the model is right or wrong, but what LCPPs actually need in order to do it well.
Thinking clearly under pressure
In our view, the answer has less to do with procedures and more to do with the conditions that allow practitioners to think clearly under pressure.
When those conditions are in place, the role works well. When they are not, even skilled and experienced practitioners can find themselves stuck, reacting to events rather than shaping them, unable to see the wood for the trees.
We have come to describe this as ‘professional paralysis’, and it is more common than the sector tends to acknowledge. The following case study, drawn from research by Anna, provides an example of this.
What professional paralysis looks like
Lee was seven years old. His mother was dependent on heroin and overdosed while he was at home in her care. He thought she was dead, and so did the practitioners who couldn’t rouse her during a child protection home visit.
He went into care. He was moved due to further neglect in placement. His mother was then diagnosed with breast cancer. Legal advice to the team was that going to court ‘would not look good’. So Lee remained in short-term foster care while his mother’s health declined. She went missing. She died in a hospice. The social worker found out she’d been moved there at the last moment and scrambled to arrange a final visit.
The social worker was not failing Lee. She cared for him deeply and worked hard to make him feel held at every turn. But somewhere in the weight of it – the guilt about the mother, the poignancy of the child’s pain, the legal uncertainty that kept shifting ground – she lost the ability to step back. She could not see the longer-term plan because she was too close to the immediate suffering to look up. The system around her also became paralysed, each professional holding a piece of the picture without anyone able to see the whole.
Lee received stable care eventually but it took a separate permanency panel to move things along. It did not come from clear, confident planning. This is what professional paralysis looks like from the inside. And for a LCPP holding an investigative and chairing function at the same time, the conditions that produced it would not be unusual. They are the everyday texture of the role and task.
Supervision that creates space to think
There is a version of supervision that looks fine on paper but does almost nothing to move the work along. The practitioner talks through their caseload, the manager takes notes, actions are agreed, then the hour ends.
David Wilkins, professor of social work at Cardiff University, spent ten years researching what actually happens in social work supervision sessions, finding a focus on what practitioners do rather than on how and why, a form of surface level reflection without any of the substance.
For LCPPs, this will not be good enough. Local authorities will need to ensure that supervision:
- makes space for the emotional reality of the work, not as a pastoral add-on, but as central to understanding what is happening for a child or family;
- critically examines assumptions, rather than just recording them; and
- helps the practitioner locate themselves in their role before and during engagement, so they ask not just, “What is this family doing?’, but, “Where am I in this and what is mine to hold?”.
In Lee’s case, a supervisor holding that kind of space might have helped the worker surface what she was carrying and think more clearly about what Lee actually needed long term. Without it, the emotional weight of the work had nowhere to go except into the worker and the task.
Combining investigation with conference chairing
When a LCPP is both the investigating worker and the conference chair, families deserve to know what that means. A restorative handover is a way of making this explicit, providing a direct, honest acknowledgement at the start of the conference.
For example, the LCPP could say:
“I’ve been the social worker throughout this assessment, and I’m also chairing today’s conference. I want to be upfront about what that means. My job as chair is to make sure everyone — including you — gets a proper chance to be heard, and that we make decisions openly, based on what we all know about [child’s name]. If you feel at any point that I’m not being fair, please say so.”
This matters for families, who can otherwise experience the dual role as confusing or implying outcomes are predetermined.
But it also matters for the practitioner. Saying it out loud is a small act of role clarity, a moment of consciously stepping into the chairing function rather than drifting. Over time, that kind of intentionality is part of what keeps paralysis at bay.
Enabling lead child protection practitioners to think clearly
Beyond supervision and transparency, LCPPs are better placed to think clearly when the following are in place:
- Reflective practice groups, offering regular containing spaces to feel and think through complex cases with peers, away from linear line management processes.
- Cultural genograms, which provide a practical tool for keeping the child’s experience central while making sense of family patterns within cultural assumptions, socio-economic disadvantage and power dynamics.
- Team models that prioritise psychological safety so practitioners can name when they are struggling.
- Deliberate attention to role clarity at key transition points, particularly when moving from investigation into conference.
- Attention to anti-racist practice, for example, through the systemic trauma-informed anti-racism (STAR) practice model developed by Hackney Council.
Making a success of the LCPP role
The LCPP model brings real opportunities. Practitioners who know a family well, and who have built trust through the assessment, are often best placed to chair the conversation about what happens next. That is a genuine strength of the model, and it is worth naming.
Making it work well is about building the right conditions around it. Practitioners who have reflective supervision, clear role support and space to think are able to hold the complexity of this role with confidence.
As Lee’s case ultimately shows, even one thoughtful structural intervention at the right moment made a real difference for a child who needed it.
The ask for every local authority implementing this model is straightforward: make sure those conditions are genuinely in place. When they are, LCPPs can do this work well.
This will result in well thought-through outcomes for children and families. The tools and approaches in this article are a starting point for thinking about what that looks like in practice.
Amy Eyers is an independent safeguarding consultant and former child protection chair with over a decade’s experience in children’s social care, across frontline, management and quality assurance roles.
Dr Anna Harvey is senior lecturer in social work and social care at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, where she works on the professional doctorate in social work. She is also a reflective supervision consultant and former child protection social worker.
